Under federal law, an employer is not allowed to discriminate or make employment decisions based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age or genetic information. However, most of these protections fall by the wayside once the number of employees falls below 20, or if any of those workers are independent contractors.

File Photo: Shannon Morse’s impressive “body of work”

If you are employed a independent contractor (also referred to as a 1099 employee, aka NET-60 employee) you literally have no workplace rights, you’re not entitled to any benefits and generally cannot sue for workplace discrimination or harassment. An independent contractor is simply someone who contracts their services to more than one company and is not under the complete control of one company. This is why Shannon Morse (aka Snubs, aka snubs.zip) would have no legal basis for filing a lawsuit because her body of work appears on more than one website.

So it would appear that TWiT’s modus operandi has been, all along, to bring in as many independent contractors as possible to avoid much of the liabilities and responsibilities that come with traditional employees, while keeping the number of 9 to 5 employees as low as possible to lessen worker rights.

Many people would argue that Leo Laporte, Lisa Laporte and TWiT aren’t doing anything wrong and that they are simply complying with the employment laws as defined. Sure, that is one point of view, if you’re a fucking sadist. But we all know that nothing in the law prevents employers from offering benefits to employees in companies with less than 20 people or taking the moral high ground that harassment of any kind should never be tolerated. If it was up to Leo Laporte, he would literally bring back slavery, and every new employee would have to qualify by first getting on their hands and knees. Harvey Weinstein would be fucking proud.

The informative yet sponsor-challengedHome Theater Geeks has finally been 86’d from the menu, but thankfully Scott Wilkinson will continue to grace us on The Tech Guy radio show, while also remaining Leo Laporte’s personal audio/video calibrator for the rest of his natural life. The LG TV tagline “Life’s Good” is extremely appropriate here, unless you’re totally trapped right now like Scott Wilkinson.

But as a goodwill gesture, those who subscribed to Tech News Today will automatically be subscribed to its weekly replacement (yay?) We haven’t seen this level of generosity since U2 gifted their fucking terrible album to all iTunes users and that didn’t end well.

Last, but not least, the highly unpredictableKnow How has been exorsized of half its shows. The twice-a-week show — which Father Robert Ballecer simply uses as a pulpit for self-praise and native ads — will now be seen only once per week. We reached out to Fr. Robert for comment and his exact words were “I TOTALLY understand that it’s painful… but this is healthy”. [ #twitlive chat – Oct. 1/17 17:52 PDT ] We firmly believe this isn’t the first time he’s used that line on somebody.

In summary, Abraham Lincoln might have freed the slaves, but Lisa Laporte did one better by liberating Mondays from the TWiT schedule. While canceling shows does marginally impact the bottom line, we don’t think this is enough to stay profitable, which is why we suspect another round of firings is just around the corner. Please tell us who you think will be fired next, and why. If you’re a TWiT employee now’s your chance to throw your co-worker under the bus.

Editor’s Note: Thank you to the anonymous chatter in our chat room for providing the content for this story. If you have breaking news please feel free to submit a tip, or if you’re tired of rotting away in your Mom’s basement please send us your resume.